Stephen Adamczak, William Harren, and Sean McNellis, a technician, dance instructor, and actor working at the theater were all accused of inappropriate sexual contact of one kind or another with students at the school in the 1980s. The first two were acquitted, and I’m not sure what happened to the third. The acquittals were attended by the allegedly abused (mostly teen age girls) not being believed by the jury, or in some cases, changing their testimony. In some cases the accusations involved what appears to have been, if true, organized abused at the home of one of the accused.

Jason McClean was a key figure in the theater’s latter years, an actor and instructor. He had been accused in civil cases of sexual abuse and/or rape of female students.

This is where it gets interesting to me. I had a student at the time whom I got to know a little outside the context of school. He had glommed on to some of the political stuff going on having to do with creation/evolution and homeschooling, and in that context we interacted a fair amount on line, and a little off line. I found out that he was a close associate of some guy who owned a couple of restaurants, and my friend/student was actually the designer and builder of the interior of his restaurants (well known local establishments). He himself was a stealth owner of an Indian restaurant in South Minneapolis which is highly recommended (he is no longer involved in it).

Over time, he and I had a major falling out, which consisted of him writing some really nasty emails to me and my responding by ignoring his existence since then. The falling out was over this: I had written quite a bit in a short time in opposition to … wait for it … rape. He was not so against rape, and in fact, he was/is a major Mens’ Rights Activists. At just about that time, I think, the actions against McClean were coming up in the news, and it was only after my student/friend/enemy had gone his own way that I put two and two together: the restaurant owner my student had been hanging with and working for was the one and only Jason McClean. Had I known the whole story then, we might have had different conversations.

Anyway, McLean, after losing something close to 6 million dollars in civil suits over his sexual abuse of kids in the theater company, and probably exposed to some criminal liability, fled first to California then to Mexico. WE all assumed that we would never see him again.

But no. McLean has returned, to California. He had owned a restaurant there the whole time. He has returned, fired all the employees, and apparently intends to reopen the restaurant and run it himself. It is unlikely to be listed as “kid friendly” on Yelp.

Interesting things are expected over the next few days and weeks. The lawyer for the main accuser who has led the crusade to set things straight was seen dancing a jig in Saint Paul.

Decades of sexual abuse occurred with very little being done about it at a major institution set up to attract and involve large numbers of children. For decades. There were accusations and investigations but that did not stop the abuse. Probably for something like 40 years.

The institution continues today, and few speak of the rapes and abuse. It is said that the Children’s Theater Company has cleaned up its act. But the history of the institution is deeply marred. Photographs and other records of the many productions depict abusers and the abused in the act of acting in various plays. Trigger warnings sometimes accompany these old bits of documentation of what should be fun and fancy, but is in fact, a dark phase in the history of so many people.

The Children’s Theater has been sued majorly, and has been found negligent, but not liable, for the abuse.

I think there are a few key lessons here, probably three (you will add your own below).

1) Things — like institutions or regular events — that cluster children are targets. Expect sexual abuse or similar, in the absence of constant vigilance. It is not like it might or might not happen. Predators will arrive at that spot just as surely as lions will arrive at a herd of Impala on the Serengeti.

2) Everyone in Minnesota believes, and will easily convince most outsiders, that we are a nice state where everything is fine and there is nothing really wrong, like dens of abuse, or human trafficking, or financial crime. This is bullshit. Scratch the surface of a Minnesota institution and you’ll often find nefarious behavior somewhere. I have lived in the districts of two different Minneapolis City Council members, and both of them served time for corruption, and one was known to be a human trafficker (according to testimony of one of his slaves, though he was never actual charged for that). National reviews of integrity and corruption often find Minnesota lacking. A few years ago an entire city was found to have been staffed by totally corrupt people who were simply pocketing a regular percentage of the money that passed through the government. (I suspect that was the inspiration for the Sanford novel “Deadline.”)

3) It was not long ago that our society excused rape and abuse, a bit less time since we made these things a slap on the hand affair unless committed by certain people against certain other people (in which case proving that it happened was not a prerequisite to lynching). It isn’t just Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. It is a certain number of the (mostly) men with whom you leave your children for the afternoon. I mean, seriously, the men running the children’s theater, for decades.

4) You tell me what else below.

From the Publisher:

When E. Jean Carroll?possibly the liveliest woman in the world and author of Ask E. Jean in Elle Magazine ? realized that her eight million readers and question-writers all seemed to have one thing in common?problems caused by men?she hit the road. Criss-crossing the country with her blue-haired poodle Lewis Carroll, E. Jean stopped in every town named after a woman between Eden, Vermont and Tallulah, Louisiana to ask women the crucial question: What Do We Need Men For?

E. Jean gave her rollicking road trip a sly, stylish turn when she deepened the story, creating a list called “The Most Hideous Men of My Life,” and began to reflect on her own sometimes very dark history with the opposite sex. What advice would she have given to her past selves?as Miss Cheerleader USA and Miss Indiana University? Or as the fearless journalist, television host and eventual advice columnist she became? E. Jean intertwines the stories of the outspoken people she meets on her road trip with her own history of bad behavior (from mafia bosses, media titans, boyfriends, husbands, a serial killer, and others) creating a decidedly dark yet hopeful, hilarious and thrilling narrative. Her answer to the question What Do We Need Men For? will shock men and delight women.

Carroll is also the author of HUNTER: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson which I mention now because you can get that book on Kindle for two bucks, and you should. You should get both.

Here is an interview you will want to watch:

From the abstract:

…this study investigates both the prevalence of sexual assault and its associated factors for straight, bisexual, and gay individuals. Our analyses use data from the Online College Social Life Survey (OCSLS), which is a cross-sectional survey of 21,000 students. As has been widely reported from previous studies, we find that around one in every four heterosexual women experience sexual assault after four years in college. We also find that gay and bisexual men report sexual assault at frequencies similar to those reported by heterosexual women. Bisexual women were the most vulnerable to sexual assault in college, as nearly two out of every five bisexual female college students had experienced sexual assault after four years in college. Greek life (e.g., membership in fraternities or sororities) proved to be strongly associated with higher prevalence of sexual assault for most groups of students. Sexual assault survivors also reported having participated in their college hookup culture at higher levels. We hope that these findings will help university administrators and counseling centers more adequately address and reduce sexual assault for all groups of students on college campuses.

The main result is clearly seen in these two graphics (pay attention to the Y-axes):

The maximum rate of assault among straight college students in this study is 25%, which is alarmingly high, but that number for females is much larger than the rate for straight males. Meanwhile, the rates for the non-straight groups ranges up to over 35%, and is generally higher than for straight students.

The study concludes,

…we believe that, given the potential wide variability of college sexual assault from college to college, colleges experiencing high rates of sexual assault complaints should try to conduct their own campus-wide survey to better estimate its overall incidence on campus, as more than two dozen universities from Harvard to the University of Southern California have already done …

…we believe that colleges with active Greek systems must establish effective intervention trainings and proper oversight with fraternities and sororities on their campuses. As we have found, it was not only women in sororities who were at risk of sexual assault, but heterosexual and gay male fraternity members as well. It seems that all members of the Greek system could benefit from increased prevention efforts focused on this group. Our findings also present evidence that sexual assault is embedded within the college party and hookup scene. Hence, prevention efforts that target students who frequently attend parties and hook up may be more effective.

…we strongly endorse a multifaceted intervention strategy that specifically targets LGB students, because these students showed markedly high rates of sexual assault in our study. Campus policy measures and interventions will likely be more successful if they acknowledge the diversity of college students who experience sexual assault, as well as the ways college social and romantic life may function to increase the risk of assault.

Ultimately, we hope that a better understanding of the percentage of reported sexual assault on campus and characteristics associated with victimization will help university administrators and counseling centers adequately continue to address and eventually reverse the increasing trend of sexual assault on college campuses across the country.

There may be a few broken links here that I’ll just deaden, but otherwise, I’m not changing the essay at this time.

I want to mention three separate instances of men acting inappropriately towards a woman that occurred to people I know over the last couple of months.

[Trigger warning: Sexual harassment and rape]

In once case, a man drove up to a woman who was just getting out of her car, in a relatively secluded parking lot, to ask her what kind of mileage she got on that model and make. There was nothing exceptional about the car that would cause special interest in this issue. In the second instance, a man skated (on in-line skates) up next to a woman who was skating on a long trail a mile or two into the woods where no one was around, and insisted on “teaching her” how to “draft” which involved him skating to a few inches behind her and holding his hand on the small of her back while he explained how great that felt. In the third instance, a stranger cornered a women in an enclosed space, tried to rape her, and in so doing hit her several times in the head while pulling off her clothing.

It isn’t possible to comfortably place all three of these instances into one category. They are not all three “creepy behavior, guys just don’t do that,” they are not all three “unwanted sexual attention” and they are not all three “violent attempted rape.” I’m saying this, the stuff I just said here in this paragraph you are reading, in a tone that you can not read (because I’m not bothering to write it that way) but that you could hear if you were here right now and I read it out loud, in a tone of dripping cynicism, the kind of tone you use when speaking to someone who is beneath contempt because of their attitude towards humanity and who you know will willfully misunderstand and scream and yell about whatever you say regarding the topic at hand. Phrasing this a slightly different way, if you are already mad at me for referring to those three events in one paragraph, then you are hopeless and I don’t want to talk to you. Stop. Reading. Now. You will not be allowed to comment on this post in any event, so just go away.

It is possible, however, that you understand why one might speak of these three things in one paragraph. In one case, the worst thing that could happen did not happen, but the guy in the story certainly was trying to make it so. In the seemingly least severe case, in the parking lot (or so I judge) it may well be that the guy asking about mileage was just asking about mileage. However, I don’t think he was. You don’t find out the mileage of a widely driven model of car by asking a person who happens to be driving one. People do not really know the mileage of the car they are driving. More importantly, if you are a guy, you should know better than to drive up to some woman who is all alone in a lonely parking lot, stop your car and come over to her to ask her a random question. And, when she looks at you, says nothing, gets back into her car and drives to a new parking spot far from you because you creeped her out, you should not be surprised. Regarding the second incident, again, the 45-52 year old (estimated) man could have grown up in a world where approaching a woman who does not know you on a lonely path in the woods and touching her without her even seeing that coming is normal. But I think not. I think that guy was either deluded into thinking that a certain percentage of strange woman he randomly touched would suddenly want to blow him right then and there, or he had nefarious goals in mind and did not expect the burst of speed he encountered. In this case, I happen to think the former is more likely than the latter for various reasons I won’t go into.

So, maybe I’m a little more suspicious than I need to be. In case II, the woman involved was less suspicious than I was, until she and I chatted about the event, after which she seemed to think this was actually a semi-bad thing that happened. So maybe I ruined it for all the perfectly innocent guys who wander around in the woods touching women they don’t know perfectly innocently. Whatever. In the case of the parking lot, the woman involved told me that she had no idea if the guy was up to something, but reasoned that the consequences of an unlikely event (an attack or whatever) were severe enough that the small effort of driving across the lot was worth it. In the event that he followed her she would then know to dial 911, or run his ass over, or whatever. Otherwise, no big deal either way.

In other words, everyone involved seems to be a little more cautious than they probably need to be, but the goal is not to hit some optimal median of reaction, because that would mean that half the time one under-reacts. That’s fine in Poker, in Horse Betting, in all sorts of activity. But, over a period of 20 or 30 years, the correct number of times to be molested or raped is not half the number of times it could have happened. No. It is zero. Just zero. And, in at least one of the cases to which I refer, the woman had prior nasty experiences already, thank you very much.

So yes, there is a point to all of this: In the first two instances I mention, but not the third, it is very possible that the man involved was either totally innocent of any sort of nefarious planning or even (immature and sophomoric) unrealistically hopeful sexual thinking. But he was still doing something wrong even if that is the case. This is because from the point of view of the woman, he could easily have been a rapist or something like a rapist, and there is no way at all for the woman to know this. Imagine the not too unlikely case where either of those women was previously assaulted in a similar setting (park path in the woods or a lonely parking lot), and an “innocent” question or an “innocent” light touch on the small of the back was a trigger? Trigger or no, both of these men did something they should not have done.

And this is why I wrote, over a year a go, a blog post about how under certain circumstances certain men should cross certain streets at certain times to avoid freaking out certain women that they are encountering while out walking. When I wrote that post, it fueled a just started and ongoing reaction to Rebecca Watson’s comment “Guys, just don’t do that” in reference to a guy doing something thoughtless, and that fueled-up reaction became the First Great Sorting among the skeptics and atheist communities, with the MRAs on one side and the Feminists on the other. With these three occurrences happening in one short period of time, I thought it would be a good idea to revisit that post, so I’ve placed a shortened and revised version of it below. Before we get to that, let me provide a short list of things guys should not do:

<ul>

<li>Don't skate up to a woman on a lonely forest path and touch her even if you have what you think of as a good excuse lined up. </li>

<li>Don't drive over to a woman who is all by herself in a lonely parking lot to ask her a question that you really don't need to ask her.  If you have a valid question and it's an emergency, go ahead.  But not just some random question that you made up so some girl would have to talk to you.</li>

<li>And in the middle of the night, there are times (not all) and places (not all) that you should somehow diffuse the sense of threat a woman might feel when your giant manly hulking form lurches towards her on some lonely street.  </li></ul>

And now….the updated original post:

I am not afraid of dogs, and most women are probably not “afraid of men.”

Except I’m actually afraid of dogs and most women are justifiably afraid of men in a certain way. Your job as a man is to understand what that means. If this puzzles you, especially about the idea of women being afraid of men at all, then you need to reconsider your position.

I admit that I see “pit bulls” as potentially dangerous. When I was a kid, it was German Shepherds (or similar dogs) that were routinely trained as “one-man” guard dogs or attack dogs, and if you saw one either it was on a chain (not a rope, a chain) or on your leg (in a bad way). Seriously. These days, Shepherds are kept because they are good with kids. Go figure. The point is, I’m fully aware that almost 100% of the danger level of a dog is based on its training and treatment and not on its breed. So, when I see a “pit bull” I know intellectually that this could be the most gentle beast I’ll ever meet in my life.

Or not.

So the other day, I walked outside and found myself utterly alone. Surrounded by garage doors and closed windows in a sort of cul-du-sac, I knew that you could probably pop someone with a small caliber handgun and no one would hear it or see it. I wasn’t thinking that exactly at the time, but I could sense the loneliness and remoteness as I closed my garage door behind me, heading for the mail box, with the medium-term intent of hopping in my car (which was not in the garage) to head off and pick up my son from daycare.

That’s when the dog showed up. It was a pit-bull like dog, though I have no idea what the actual breeding history of this animal was. It was tall, almost as tall as a Dane, but had the pit-bull head and a boxer-like body. Some sort of Frankendogish mastiff derivative, perhaps.

The dog was un-chained and frenetic. The first thing it did was to run at me and bump its head into my leg. Then it ran around in the cul-de-sac, running up to doorways and then turning instantly away each time. When I say running I mean mainly walking very fast. The dog was only bounding into the air now and then. It came towards me a couple of times but almost as though I wasn’t there, it would just pass me. Instinctively, I employed the usual voice and hand gestures one employs to bring a dog to a spot and have it sit, so I could look for ID on its collar, but it would have none of that. This dog was not receiving any of my signals.

That, and the fact that it was foaming at the mouth a little, gave me pause.

Different instincts suddenly kicked in. I’ve had encounters with dangerous dogs, and if you’ve read the Lost Congo Memoirs you’ll know that I’ve had dealings with rabid dogs as well. After the fourth or fifth time that the frenetic zombie-like (but fast-style zombie, not slow-style zombie) frothing beast passed by, having made my way to the car, I quickly unlocked the door, hopped in, and slammed it shut.

That is when I noticed that my heart was racing and my adrenalin was pumping. I had just encountered a rabid dog that, once it freed itself from whatever trance state the brain-eating disease hat put it in, was going to turn on me and bite me in the face (last place you want to get bit by a rabid dog).

Or not. Probably not. The foam was surely just drool. It was hot out. Its frenetic behavior was probably just because it was lost. Its failure to understand my commands was probably … whatever. The dog was probably just confused. I suppose. Maybe.

So, I usually keep what happens in my house private, or at least if I write about it check first with the involved parties, but I think I will be forgiven for spontaneously telling you about a conversation I had with Amanda last night.

For the course of much of Rebeccapocalypse (the maneno with Elevator Guy, Rebecca Watson, and so on) Amanda was out of town while a friend of mine visiting from out of town and I huddled over our computers down in the blog cave, or visited SkepchiCON where, coincidentally, the Actual Rebecca Watson and other Skepchicks were hanging out, where the two of us fussed over the problem. So, Amanda missed all of the run-up, hadn’t read any of the blog posts, and had gotten only the briefest overview of events from me after her return. The story of Rebecca and Elevator Guy was low priority for her at the moment and the story thus went to the back of her head (well, probably, actually the front, but that’s not how we refer to it) for processing. Then, last night, the whole thing rushed forward and Amanda ran down to the blog cave to tell me something. I should say, this is a rare event. She was kinda freaked out.

“Do people get it?” she asked me, kinda freaked out (as noted).

“Get what?” I was distracted and unclear on the point she was making.

“Do people get what it is like for a woman to have a man join her on an elevator in the middle of the night? Do they understand that this is ALWAYS something that raises one’s stress level, even if just a little?”

“Huh?”

“Sometimes more, sometimes less, it depends on your state of mind, the time of day, all sorts of other factors, but if I’m in a hotel somewhere in the middle of the night and some guy I don’t know gets on the elevator, my stress level goes up and stays there until one of us gets off. If he says something to me other than ‘nice weather we’re having’ I get much more stressed. That’s true to some degree for all women.”

“Elevator? What?” She was going fast, almost upset.

“If the guy did what that guy did, asking me to his room, I’d totally Freak.”

Ah. She was talking about Elevator Guy. “Yeah. Desiree said would punch him in the face.”

“Me too.”

“That guy’s gonna have a bloody nose. Hey, did I tell you about this dog the other day?”

“Huh?”

Anyway, in life I was not as clueless as the above dialog suggests. Amanda hadn’t really been thinking about the issue at all, and the moment she gave it any thought she immediately concluded that Elevator Guy did the wrong thing and that Rebecca Watson, in pointing this out to the clueless, was doing all women in the West, where there are elevators and a chance of some equality, a service. And every other woman that I’ve spoken to about this has said the same thing, more or less.

Guys (and some gals) who are not getting this are making two mistakes. First, they consider the event post hoc and say that no one was attacked or raped, therefore there was no threat of rape or anything else serious. If it didn’t happen, it couldn’t have happened. (I will assume you get why that is stupid.) Second, they think of this sort of thing generally and figure that the chances that Elevator Guy was a real threat was low. Why or how they assess this is beyond me, since they weren’t there, but I suppose statistically it is a reasonably valid guess … chances are the foam is just drool, chances are the frenetic behavior is just confusion, chances are the zombie-like state of the 160 pound dog is just … oh, wait, sorry, I was talking about Elevator Guy. Right. Chances are that Elevator Guy was just a socially ignorant slightly drunk dweeb of no consequence.

Or not. And it is the “or not” part that a woman MUST pay attention to in order to live her life as long as she can before her first sexual assault, or to increase the amount of time spent between her most recent sexual assault and her next one, or to make the next sexual assault hopefully non-fatal or something that she can get out of quickly or minimize in some way. Because very few women get away without something happening in their lifetime.

It occurred to me some time ago that my knowledge of a woman having been sexually assaulted in the past is correlated with how much I know about that woman generally. I quickly add that correlation is not causation. The point is that if you know a woman and don’t have knowledge of her prior sexual assault, that may not be because it didn’t happen. It just may be because you don’t know.

In fact, if you are in your 30s or older and you don’t know of any women who have had a sexual assault or something in their history, that means that there are certain conversations you are not having and that you exist in a state of cluelessness. Almost certainly.

When I was about 14 through 17, hanging around in an inner-city crime ridden urban environment, with no car, and spending a lot of time at night on foot going places, I learned to do this trick. Say I’m walking down State Street and it’s 1:00 AM and there’s a woman walking in front of me in the same direction. With very few exceptions, I’ll overtake her, and there will then be this long, maybe one-third of a city block long period when I’m right behind her, then right next to her, then just in front of her.

From any of those three vantage points, I could grab her. From behind, or from next to her, or by turning around and grabbing her from the front. Then I could push her to the ground and drag her into an alley or whatever.

But I would not do that. Therefore, the woman walking alone at 1:00 AM in the morning downtown has nothing to worry about, right? Well, actually, since she does not know me she has a great deal to worry about because the chances that some guy walking (fast) alone down State Street in the middle of the night is some sort of sexual assaulter or mugger is hard to assess, and not zero.

So I learned this trick. Cross the street about a block back and “pass” the lady that way. Same with a potential head-on encounter. If you see a woman walking towards you in the middle of the night on a lonely urban street bla bla bla, my practice in those days was to cross the street to not stress her out.

Interestingly I stopped doing that second move when I moved to South Minneapolis a number of years back because because the social context there was very different. It would have been considered very bad form. Instead, you make eye contact and say hello. To everybody. That’s how we roll in that neighborhood. Context is important (a fact that many of those who have been harassing me on the Internet ever since I first wrote this post a year ago do not, and never will, understand.)

All men. ALL men who have given sufficient consideration to women’s position in our society do something like this walking trick (maybe not even about walking, but about something) in the right context (for some that will be common, for others, rare). If you are a man and you do not know about this then there is a problem with you.

Here’s the thing. A woman normally possesses a certain sense of caution related specifically to things that mainly happen to women, which does cause stress. A man should respect that and act accordingly, by doing certain things and not doing certain things. Every single person I’ve spoken to about Rebeccapocalypse has had a view of this roughly in the same range: Rebecca displayed normative behavior in being put off by Elevator Guy and it was up to her to decide to speak about it, and generally a good thing to do so. People do disagree on the modus operendus of speaking out, but not dramatically. Everyone understands that a woman should have a certain sense of caution … as should a man but in different ways, for different things, to different degrees … and that a man should respect this and act accordingly. By doing certain things and not doing certain things.

But then there are these people, mostly guys, and also Richard Dawkins, shockingly, who don’t get it at all. I’m thinking that the fame factor has caused Dawkins to live a life in which certain conversations have been avoided, and he is just socially retarded because of this, though in most ways he is a fine example of an English Gentleman. Or maybe being socially retarded and being an English Gentleman are the same thing in certain areas. Oh, right, this might apply to privilege, might-en it? And privilege might be what makes men tend to be stupid about certain things. Get out of my way, Bitch, I’m walking down the street and I don’t care that trammeling past you is going to freak you out. Your problem. What are you doing out in the middle of the night by yourself anyway? Oh, if I was asked over for coffee at 4AM in the morning in Ireland on an elevators, I’d see it as a complement! Yes, yes, I suspect Richard Dawkins has been asked over for coffee and servicing at the wee hours of the morning many times, because he’s a star and that is what happens. So from his point of view, I suppose he was giving Rebecca the highest complement when he figured that she had no brief: “Rebecca, you are one of us stars! You have a groupie! Good show, Old Girl!”

Oh, but sorry, my cynicism is getting the better of me. All that shit that was in my head came out rather suddenly. Sorry about that. Anyway, I want to close by restating my point so it can’t be missed. Though, if you are an MRA you’ll miss it anyway, but hopefully you’ve gone away by now.

I was freakin’ afraid of that dog, even though I know how to handle big dogs. I was afraid of that dog even though I’ve smelled the breath of more than a few wild super-carnivores who were busy contemplating me as a meal or a rival, so a dog should be nothing to me. I was afraid of that dog even though I’m not afraid of dogs. I could not help myself from being afraid, and I have chosen to do the very unmanly thing of not lying to you about that. My heart was beating when I got into the car, into safety.

And here’s the thing, the point you need to get: I can only tell you about the dog. I can’t tell you a story about a sexual assault. I don’t have one. I only have the dog story for you because I’m a 50-something year old man, not a 50-something year old woman. If I was a 50-something year old woman, I’d be able to tell you stories on point for the current discussion, stories about men who cornered me, who touched me when I didn’t want that, who verbally threatened me, who woke me up in the middle of the night or tracked me down on some dark street or who freaked me out in an elevator. If I was typical, that is.

But I only have the dog story to help you empathize with Rebecca because I’m a man.

Oh by the way, that assault I mentioned in the beginning? Yeah, it was in an elevator. The woman was not able to get away by pressing “door open” and walking out the door as Richard Dawkins recommended. Oh, she pounded on that button as she screamed for help but it didn’t work. What did work was fighting the guy off, and that only worked because she was big and strong enough, and only then, barely. So Richard, do you have any further advice for women about how to not be raped? Thanks, please keep it to yourself. Nobody wants to hear it.

It did not take long, however, for me to realize this was a rather bone-headed way of looking at it. For one thing, the actual definitions of rape culture in use do not in any way limit its application to those extreme and horrific cases. Also, culture is complex. We tend to collect data, make generalizations, and see solutions at societal levels such as entire nations or even continents, not at the level of “cultures” which are, in any event, edge-less complex interconnected entities despite the common use of the shorthand term (“culture”). The elements of rape culture can be in place in a country or region where rape is more rare, or more common.

An excellent definition of rape culture is provided by Marshall University’s Women’s Center:

Rape Culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety.

Rape Culture affects every woman. The rape of one woman is a degradation, terror, and limitation to all women. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape. This cycle of fear is the legacy of Rape Culture.

The same web page goes on to provide examples (i.e., blaming the victim, tolerating sexual harassment, inflating false rape report statistics, and so on) and also provides a few tips to combat it (changes in language, social engagement, critical thinking, respect, etc.).

Rape culture is a thing, and it applies in the US. The fact that it probably actually applies everywhere (Do you know of any exceptions? If so please elaborate in the comments below!) does not actually water down the definition but rather, exposes the underpinnings of rape culture as a human-wide problem. This indicates it either stems from the basic evolutionary biology of humans or ubiquitous common cultural features of human societies (such as a self perpetuating patriarchy) or, more likely, a causal structure that exists independently of our post hoc notions of nature and nurture.

Politically, rape culture has another meaning; it is a touchstone to the inimical false debate between so-called “Mens Rights Advocates” and basic humanistic, including feminist, values. To get a feel for this check out the definition of “Rape Culture” in Wikipedia, and scroll down to the “Criticisms” section.

The Criticisms section sites Caroline Kitchen’s ironically titled opinion piece “Its Time to End ‘Rape Culture’ Hysteria.” Kitchensi is a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute, a right wing “think” tank which is exactly where I would look to find a female willing to fill stinky shoes of a Men’s Rights Advocate for the purpose of toning down public discourse on rape. The section also brings in the critique by Christina Sommers, libertarian anti-feminist. And so on. I’m not claiming here that these criticisms are invalid or should not be heard (though I quickly add that I disagree with them). I’m just pointing out that the use of “rape culture” invokes the MRA counter-argument (to almost everything) as its main counter-point. This is what we see in many other areas of public discourse as well. If the main critique of a new study on anthropogenic global warming comes from other climate scientists that’s one thing. If the main critique comes from the usual cadre of science denialists many in the employee directly or indirectly of the petroleum and coal industries, that’s another thing. The litany of critiques of the “rape culture” idea in the seemingly well updated entry in Wikipedia comes from the usual suspects, not from within the sociological or anthropological, or even criminological, communities where spirited debate about almost everything is the norm. This does not prove anything but it is a clue.

One could argue that “rape culture” has become a dog whistle for feminism, or even a particular brand of feminism. That might actually be true. But any concept that tries to link cultural context to appropriately scrutinized individual behaviors is going to get dog whistled by the opposition.

Which is worse, rape threats or lightening up about rape threats? Since I hardly ever get rape threats and the ones I get are absurd, it is not really for me to say. The question here, is what does a woman who is active on line and gets numerous and scary rape (and other) threats feel about those threats vs. advice from allies(ish) who say “don’t worry about it, just leave that behind.”

This is tricky stuff, because the overt strategy one takes can vary depending on circumstances and there are a lot of valid strategies one can choose, but few strategies one can foist on others.

A person who is outspoken about a particular issue and receives threats over that issue could take those threats very seriously, calling in authorities, hardening defenses, counter-agitating or counter-activating, and so on, while publicly not talking about the threats at all, or perhaps very publicly brushing them off.

Or, the recipient of the threats could do something very different, bringing the details out in the open, making clear to her audience what is happening and why it is wrong, and making the whole thing very public, in order that people know. And maybe that people change. Or, at lest, that social expectations change ands some people shut up.

These two strategies differ in a number of ways. The former strategy may effectively neutralize some of the threats, those from attention seekers who are themselves paying attention, perhaps, but it will do little to stop or slow down threats from your basic miscreant. The latter strategy is likely to generate more threats because, simply, more jerks become aware of a particular target, but the public strategy serves a larger, very important purpose of educating people to the fact that these things happen, and not only that, but they happen commonly and are rather severe to say the least.

It is really up to the person who is at the receiving end of this horrible stuff to make that decision. One thing can be said, though: because of the dynamics of interaction on the internet, the woman who calls out the harassers in order to move us all forward, in the general direction of civilization (which is slowly being reinvented on the Internet) and widespread social justice, is ultimately hurting herself for the benefit of others. When a man does that sort of thing, Internet society calls him a hero. When a woman does that sort of thing, Internet society at best questions her motives, but commonly does worse. She is labeled as a cunt.

Here is my friend and colleague Rebecca Watson laying out her position on this issue in her most recent YouTube vlog, “Dear Guy Who Wants Me to Stop Talking About Feminism“. She addresses the question that is the title of this post.

I’m not embedding Rebecca’s video here because I want you to GO TO HER YOUTUBE CHANNEL and watch the video there. That way, if you feel like leaving a comment, you’ll be there. I assume most, perhaps all, readers of my blog will be supportive and thoughtful. Otherwise go fuck yourself, OK?

Thank you very much that is all.

UPDATE: ONLY PART OF HUMANITY SUCKS SEE THIS NEWS

OK, you may want some background.

A Reddit Regular, perhaps a Reddit celeb (or at least he is now) wants to write a book on how guys seduce women, and he’s asking for money on Kickstarter. One of his tips is this: You move in close, pull out your penis, take the woman’s hand and …. whatever.

I find it interesting that many commenters are referring to that as inappropriate, or sexual assault, by way of objecting to it. I’m pretty sure, though, that it is rape. Probably depends on the state. In any event, now that I’ve revealed one of Ken Hoinsky’s helpful tips for how to get women to like you, I’ll quickly add just in case you didn’t know: Guys, don’t do that. Just. Don’t. Do. That. Don’t.

The book rape-apologist and redditor Ken Hoinsky intends to “write” is mostly going to consist of previously written garbage he’ll steal from the Reddit “Seduction” community. Clearly, Hoinsky is a loser of the lowest level if that’s all he’s go. Ctrl-c, Ctrl-v, give me money.

Here’s a question that is being asked: Why does Kickstarter allow projects that are basically rape handbooks? And why should anybody ever even visit the Kickstarter site, or give any money to any project of any kind, or take any of your projects to Kickstarter, as long as they Kickstarter is run by boneheaded idiots who think this monstrous project is OK?

Here’s a petition you can sign to tell the Kickstarter CEO to do the right thing.

Here’s the story in more detail.

I only watched a small part of a video made by The Justicar who had apparently discovered the Boston Massacre and could not stop himself from commenting on it, just enough to be certain that he is willfully misrepresenting the idea. I am not sure why he has this fascination with the idea and spends so much energy on this. It looks to me like a strong case of denial of one or more of his own inner switches.

The idea has always been discussed as a model, or as a hypothesis. There is not a hypothesis that men who at home and in non-war time situations do not rape do so in war time situations. This is established fact, not in dispute, and not hypothesis. The rape switch is one version of an approach to explaining this, and it remains a reasonable idea, if somewhat oversimplified.

An aside to address a question Stephanie brought up in her post: As I recall, the idea of writing about war time rape at that time was presented by Sheril Kirshenbaum to a couple of her fellow bloggers then at Scienceblogs.com, including me and Dr. Isis, and I mentioned it to Stephanie.

This post has some 20 or so references that address much of the discussion in the comment section of Stephanie’s post.

The “rape switch” is not a trigger, and it is not “conditioning.” The concept of a “trigger” is already there and in use and was not cooped by the original research. The “rape switch” is different.

One of the points of confusion caused by my initial wording in my post, and also clarified by me then (but that clarification was duly ignored of course) is this: That in the context in which the theoretical “rape switch” is turned on the men for which it is turned on (not “all men” as is often misstated) are rapists. This was meant to indicate that given certain circumstances (and here you can have your triggers if you want) this man would now have the possibility of rape on his list of actual possible behaviors to carry out, as opposed to when the switch is turned off. This is a unique and nuanced use of the word “rapist” which is usually used to refer to someone who has actually raped. The two concepts are clearly different, and as mentioned I did clarify that at the time, but that clarification was willfully ignored by many, as it is being ignored today. The problem is that the word “potential rapist” does not work either because at some level all men and maybe even all women are “potential” anythings. I chose the term “rapist” to indicate men with the “rape switch” turned on (hypothetically) quite intentionally. I was correct in using the word. But I was wrong to assume that nuance would be understood and appreciated.

I will put that another way to be clearer, because the fog of ignorance is thick. The following is a metaphor that will be especially useful for people who regularly smoke or have regularly smoked.

If you smoke tobacco for several years, you are a smoker. One could say that you are a smoker because you smoke. Then, say you quit. One could say you are no longer a smoker. But, smoking is still very much something on the list of things you could do in a very different way than smoking is considered by a non-smoker who has never smoked. A smoker who has quit, for quite some time, is still quite capable of smoking but does not do so because of willpower and other reasons (supportive friends and family, anti smoking rules or agreements in the workplace or at home, etc.) After a person becomes addicted to smoking the “smoking switch” is on, even if the person does not smoke (because they quit).

This is not to say that the “rape switch” has anything to do with addiction (there are those individuals who will willfully take the above paragraph out of context and abuse what I’ve said to suggest I meant that). The point is that a person who is capable of smoking and wants to smoke and could smoke but does not smoke is by one definition of “smoker” not a smoker, and by another definition of “smoker” is.

Let me give you another example. Because I know this is hard for some of you. A person might learn a second language. But then, they never speak it, or hardly ever. For example, I am proficient in KiNguana, a Central and East African language. But I never really use it these days. I am, however, still a KiNguana speaker. In theory, one could even learn a language with intense private study and never utter a word in that language to another human being. Such a person is still a speaker of said language. The rape switch hypothesis says that in certain social settings most men walk around not having rape on their list of things to do. It is unthinkable to them, they are not motivated to consider it at all on a day to day basis, but then, under other social circumstances, the idea of actually carrying out rape is within the range of possibility for them. Wartime would be one of those social setting. Many men in a wartime setting would have the “rape switch” on with simply means that raping someone is a possibility for them. They may also have reasons to not light up, not speak the Esperanto they quietly learned on their own without telling anyone, or to not rape. What they do is not necessarily what they are psychologically capable of doing, in an immediate and easily retrievable way.

The reason that a “rape switch” is an interesting idea is that a wide range and a large number of men in the context of war (but not all war-time situations) become individuals who are quite capable of rape. A very small proportion of women who work for Neiman Marcus or any other corporate entity in New York City or some other place not in a state of war might possibly be raped by their bosses. A much larger proportion of women who work for the military and are deployed in war zones are. A very small number of men walking around on the streets of Saint Paul, Minnesota rape the women they encounter now and then. A very large number of soldiers on patrol in the country side in Viet Nam and World War II and other wars did. These men are all different, from different backgrounds, with differing moral and ethical codes, ideas, and experiences, but a lot of them end up raping women anyway. A switch is an interesting hypothesis exactly because it is a direct connection between simply being a man and being in a war time situation, without going through all the other conditional variables. The rape switch is not a trigger and it is not conditioning. The rape switch hypothesis is interesting, and it may be incorrect.

This is all interesting and worth discussing, but there is a more immediate question that comes to mind. Why do people like The Justicar do what they do? What is wrong with them?

Is this clear?

OK, now that we have that straight, allow me to bring out this one piece of data I thought I’d never have use of. It is a very limited piece of data, not very useful for a large number of reasons. The question at hand can be divided into two parts: 1) What is the chance of a given intromissive internally insemnating sexual event leading to a pregnancy in a woman not on birth control of average fecundity? Then, 2) Does this probability go down, as the good Congresman claims, or does it stay the same.

The answer to the first question is that it is not terribly high. We are not a one-copulation=one baby species. It takes a bunch of tangos to turn out a tyke, on average (but statistics is NOT a birth control method!). As to the second question, it turns out that according to certain data it actually goes up. It is reasonable to suggest that the chance of a single copulation leading to pregnancy if that copulation is rape is about double the overall average. Maybe.

This has been discussed by Thornhill and Palmer, authors of the controversial book “A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion” and subsequent to the storm of debate that arose from that it has been looked at more carefully and a little bit verified (see this).

I can very easily suggest explanations for this and I can also cast more doubt on the studies. First, the doubt. We have no idea what the actual relationship between having sex and having babies is. One would think we would know, but we don’t. Sure, sex leads to babies and all that, but how many sperm, or how many ejaculations, or whatever, does it take before a single sperm is allowed access to the ovum leading to a pregnancy? Scientifically speaking the research needed to answer this question has not been done. There are no controlled studies in which a sufficient sample of subjects across a range of fertilities (and varying in other appropriate factors) repeatedly have sex with everything carefully measured and controlled. Not one study has done this. I don’t expect there to be one any time soon. Our estimates of fecundity are based on reported data, vague estimates, and a lot of thumb sucking. So, when we have a couple of rape-related studies that show a higher pregnancy rate than background, unless it was a lot higher, we would need to take that with a grain of salt.

But if there really is a higher chance of pregnancy resulting from rape, this still may not mean much. There are a number of reasons this could happen, some of which are discussed in the above mentioned book. One very distinct possibility is that rapists are selecting victims somehow, perhaps with their Darwinian wiles, as it were, or perhaps for purely random reasons, who are slightly more fecund than the larger sample from which the baseline statistic is calculated. In any case, the difference is not large.

But, there it is also not lower. The chance of pregnancy from what the Good Congressman calls “legitimate rape” … a term that will surely live in infamy … is not lower. It might be higher. But it is not lower. The man is an ignorant fool. He is wrong.

Here he is being wrong:

Hattip Kent Jones.

Added: Here’s an idea, ask that this dude be relieved of his duties on the House Science and Technology Committee. Which, amazingly, he is on.